Yes! This would be great. -Neil
On Nov 29, 2005, at 1:44 PM, Henry Minsky wrote:
What I am beginning to think is that there need to be two different
instantiation APIs
for components, one which is designed to be called from LZX (XML),
which does
a lot of "automagic" setup, and one designed to be called from
script, which exposes all
the individual steps as much as possible. So you can decide for
example to instantiate a
menu item before there is a parent to add it to, or if you need to
add it to a place in
the parent which isn't at the end of the current list of items.
Tucker has proposed using something besides "new" to create new
components in script. I think that is a good idea, but maybe we
need to go one step further and have some conventions for two
different standard ways to instantiate a component:
One way is the "LZX" way, where you pass a parent view, and an
arglist, so that "new MyFrob(...)" behaves as much as possible like
using <MyFrob> in LZX; as much magic as possible is done to install
the object into it's parent environment.
And the other would be the "script" way, which behaves in a more
modular fashion, so you would expect to manually instantiate an
object, then add it to a parent or not at your discretion, and set
callbacks and event handlers, etc, manually.
On 11/29/05, Don Hopkins <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
What are the advantages of dynamically creating user interface
components through xml data binding, instead of using a JavaScript
api?
I've been playing around with pie menus for Laszlo, trying to come
up with a Laszlish way to dynamically create and configure them.
http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/40
http://www.donhopkins.com/lzxnet/my-apps/PieTest.lzx
http://www.donhopkins.com/lzxnet/my-apps/PieTest.lzx?lzt=source
http://www.donhopkins.com/lzxnet/my-apps/piemenu.lzx?lzt=source
The Laszlo pie menus don't currently support an API for modifying
the menus dynamically, but I've been thinking about how that should
work, and how it could support user-editable menus that knew how to
write themselves back out as XML.
Some pie menus are dynamically generated from data, so all items
are usually handled the same (or from a small set of pre-defined
handlers based on the dataset), but other pie menus are designed by
hand with custom handlers, tracking feedback and graphical
resources associated with each item.
One problem with only defining widgets from XML, is how do you
attach custom methods and event handlers to widgets?
Including custom JavaScript handlers and constraints in the widget
xml definition would require a JavaScript compiler in the Flash
player (but it would be possible in the DHTML version of Laszlo).
You have to pre-define all the handlers and constraint expressions
as named functions, refer to their names in the xml, and look them
up at run-time.
-Don
--
Henry Minsky
Software Architect
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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